Tyranny by Bureaucracy

We are halfway to tyranny by bureaucracy. The Obama administration's recent move allowing the EPA to declare air, that's right AIR, as a pollutant is just the latest demonstration of the danger of allowing government to regulate our lives through an endless array of federal agencies and unelected bureaucrats.

Since every human activity produces carbon dioxide, the EPA has basically been granted unprecedented power by the Obama administration to tax and control every aspect of our lives. The only bigger threat to our democracy is the government takeover of health care, which should it pass, will create 111 new bureaucracies. Together, these two entities will strip away every one of our freedoms until we won't be able to do anything without a bureaucrat's permission. And since these bureaucrats are not elected, it's next to impossible to hold them accountable. Once they become entrenched, it's even harder to remove them.

Democrats and the Left try to sell their intrusive big government programs as beneficial and compassionate, but there is nothing beneficial or compassionate about tyranny by bureaucracy. It replaces individual choice with false promises, promises the government makes in benefits it claims it will hand out, only to snatch them away later by creating a maze of arcane rules and confusion that prevents those most in need from ever receiving them. This is why many people eligible for Medicaid fail to sign up. It's also why it takes an average of 6 months to get an MRI in Canada and twice that to have surgery. Is there anything compassionate about forcing someone to wait a year in pain and agony for treatment? Is there anything compassionate about telling someone to take the pain medicine instead of ever getting treated? Of course not.

Every progressive program sounds harmless at first, but in reality they are a virus feeding on their democratic host. Create an agency that provides health care or an agency to protect the environment. Who can argue against such lofty goals? But they are a ruse. Once granted unlimited power, these agencies hemorrhage dollars through fraud and waste all the while destroying the spirit of the individual. We see this today with the EPA, which can make or break entire industries, killing jobs and putting families out of work simply by how they choose to regulate air.

Of course, If the bureaucratic virus prevails, the host will die, and since the virus can't stand on it's own, the whole system eventually collapses into chaos and anarchy. This was the goal of Karl Marx, the father of progressivism's sister ideology, who wished for "an endless revolution." Again, I note that endless revolutions are neither compassionate nor beneficial.

Perhaps no one understood the tyranny of bureaucracy better than Adam Smith, one of freedoms greatest proponents and a founder of America's free market principles, when he warned:

"As soon as government management begins, it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is a the tyranny of the totalitarian state."

The progressive movement, and Democrats in particular, have spent the last 100 years chipping away at the Constitution for "the greater good", adding one bureaucracy on top of another. Unfortunately, there is no "greater good." If the liberties of one man or woman can be trampled upon, then by definition no rights are absolute, and the government can run over anybody they choose. Nothing good can come of this.